As part of an initiative announced late last year, BMC Software has released PATROL Application Storage Resource Manager (ASRM), a layer in BMC’s Application-Centric Storage Management (ACSM) solution.
The company said the release of the PATROL ASRM directly improves business processes by relating storage assets to the applications they support. Within the ACSM solution, BMC said companies can extract specific application information and associate it with all of its related storage assets.
“Our customers have told us that storage is becoming a bigger problem,” said Dan Hoffman, director of storage solutions for BMC. “Data growth is unstoppable these days. Application Storage Resource Manager is the piece of the product that brings application awareness to the solution.”
Hoffman explained that other storage management products can’t tell the end user how much storage a particular application uses. He said that with the PATROL ACSM solution, customers are able to map pictures of their storage on the topology console in order for the end user to see exactly how much storage an application takes up.
“Application storage management is intended to make a better and quicker connection between storage and applications,” Hoffman said. “By associating storage, we can associate a storage application to its storage assets. Companies can’t just buy more storage as their data grows. They have to look at who is consuming it, who is growing the fastest, where do they need to put the storage and how is it performing. Anybody consuming disk space and who does not have a handle on how their storage is being consumed or being used today probably needs a product like this.”
BMC’s PATROL ACSM is made up of integrated and independent components that work together to deliver reduced total cost of ownership, improved application performance, application-directed storage policies and procedures and a centralized view of all storage assets, the company said. The components of the ACSM solution include Knowledge Modules – such as PATROL for Network Appliance Fillers – PATROL Storage Network Manager, Patrol Storage Resource Manager, and PATROL Application Storage Resource Manager.
Michael Popp, network services specialist for Cymer, a San Diego-based supplier of laser illumination sources used to manufacture semiconductors, said that using the network application Knowledge Module gives him a single view of all storage.
“It is really easy to see where everything is,” Popp said. “When you come in in the morning, you can take a look at the console and see if there has been any activity. You can see it immediately without having to run any queries or run special scripts.”
Popp added that the BMC product is very easy to deploy. “You can buy it, install it and it works. A lot of the other applications I have seen have a lot of customization that needs to be done. For us, it was very simple to install and configure.”
BMC’s PATROL ACSM is available now and pricing depends on the size of the managed storage environment. For more information, visit www.bmc.com.
